Feminist strike, social reproduction, and debt

Verónica Gago and Luc'a Cavallero

Chapter 42 in Handbook of Research on the Global Political Economy of Work, 2023, pp 503-511 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: In this text, we hypothesize that the international strikes of women, lesbians, trans persons, and travestis, since 2017 to 2021, allows for debating and visibilizing a map of the heterogeneity of labor in a feminist register. We analyze how the feminist strike provides a class content to the demands and the language of the protest even if the vocabulary is not explicit, precisely because it brings us to stop the machinery that makes social reproduction possible, demonstrating its strategic character, which is, at the same time, constantly hidden. The feminist strike, unlike the traditional labor strike (that is, of the masculine, waged, unionized labor move) is not linked to categorized and recognized “trades,” but rather tasks that sometimes even invent their own names to make them palpable. At the same time, it refers to production and its inevitable link with reproduction and makes explicit why certain tasks correspond to a determined sexual division of labor and why capital accumulation is impossible without gender mandates. In this sense, it is simultaneously a labor strike and an existential strike: it shows the areas in which life and work become mixed and lose their distinction. The meanings enabled by the feminist strike are linked to the struggles historically related to the labor and living conditions of the majorities, that are updated today to account for the forms that labor takes as generalized precarity and the tasks that are rendered invisible and naturalized, again and again, for certain bodies.

Keywords: Business and Management; Development Studies; Economics and Finance; Politics and Public Policy Sociology and Social Policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
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